Magnolias and Plums in the Ice Storm: a Pruning Guide

First, the magnolias at Bahati Farm. This darling is 38 years old now. She has seen a lot of storms like this.

Note how there are gaps between branches, which new branches fill, and gaps between buds (plus the gaps left by absent flowers and leaves, which have helped create the gaps you see here) which have filled with ice. She is willowy, so she has shaken most of it off. Not like the Italian plum below:

These gaps don’t lie against buds, as they do with the magnolia, but in lines, in keeping with the growth pattern of this tree. Note the difference in a Japanese plum, below:

She is catching the ice in the gaps of missing fruit, on each bud. Look at them sparkle like plums! This is a simple demonstration of the power of a word to open up an understanding into tree growth and how to prune to encourage it. One doesn’t prune branches. One creates gaps, of the right nature for the tree, so she may fill them with productive growth, which encourages new gaps. The ice is like a camera, that reveals what is otherwise sensed less directly. Tomorrow, I will show you a fjall, another gapping energy, and its uses. Till then, love the ice you’re with!

This is a Blog about People in Place

I am working at rebuilding human relationships to the earth, growing the global from the local and developing new environmental technologies out of close observation of the land. The land is the watershed and run of the Okanagan River in the North American West, and the Chilcotin and Columbia volcanic plateaus and basins that surround it. It is the goal of this blog to build the future now and to do it through attention to art, earth, science and beauty, so that there is, actually, a future for our children and a path for them to feel out their way to the earth should they ever find themselves in the dark. The project will lead to two book manuscripts in the summer of 2013, one on the salmon of the Okanagan River, the last major run on the Columbia system, and the other on the connection between the Manhattan Project and the political and industrial face of Eastern Washington and Southern British Columbia. They will do so within the broader context of land-based technologies, in forms that are simultaneously art and science. In this land without borders, there is no international line at the 49th parallel, cutting our country in two, and no imagined wall between settler and indigenous cultures. We are all walking together. We are all the land speaking.